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Unforgettable night at a 250-year-old ryokan
Imagine yourself walking a hot spring village after dark in a yukata and wooden sandals, unlocking nine public baths with your own key, and sleeping in a 250-year-old wooden inn that people swear inspired the bathhouse in Spirited Away. The wild snow monkeys are a bus ride and a forest walk from the door.
Adapted from How to DIY Japan as a Small Family — two weeks, five cities, no tour guides.
🎬 The bathhouse everyone thinks they recognize
Kanaguya has been taking guests since 1758: a tall, dark, wooden building of staircases and lanterns and corridors that don't quite go where you expect. It's the ryokan most often named as the model for Aburaya, the bathhouse in Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away.
Studio Ghibli has never confirmed it, or any of the other candidates, and Kokuya makes the same claim from up the street. The resemblance is real though, and Joe Hisaishi, who wrote the score, grew up in neighboring Nakano City.
🏮 The night we still talk about
We checked into Kanaguya after a morning at the snow monkey park, having got our fill of watching macaques live their best lives. More on them later.
As soon as you walk in you're offered a pair of the ryokan's slippers, and then someone takes you up and shows you how your room works. It's a traditional one: tatami mat flooring you cross in stocking feet, shoji paper screens where you would expect doors, a low table in the middle with cushions on the floor around it, and a tea set already laid out. There is no bed anywhere in the room, which takes a second to make sense of.
After settling in we headed straight for one of the private onsen baths, the size that suits a couple or a small family. Kanaguya has eight baths on site: some private like that one, and some larger ones separated by gender.
6 more sections, including The nine baths, and the key
The rest of the guide — Dinner and breakfast, kaiseki style, Booking Kanaguya, If Kanaguya is full: Kokuya and 3 more — opens right here when you drop your email in.
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